Book No. 2 in her series of Edwina Goodman mysteries -- "Death by Hitchcock" (Cozy Cat Press, $14.95) -- takes readers deeper into the lives of the professors and students at fictional Cushing College.

Grodin's physics professor heroine gets to test her sleuthing skills once again after a strangling on the opening night of a Hitchcock film festival. She also draws closer to police detective Will Tenney in the process.

"I think I gained confidence with this book. You learn so much just by writing the first one, which was rife with rookie mistakes," the Wilton novelist said during a recent phone interview.

One of the biggest challenges of the first mystery, "Physics Can Be Fatal," was establishing the world of Cushing College.

"That went through many, many drafts, and now, looking back at it, maybe I shouldn't have published the first one," Grodin said.

"Death by Hitchcock" draws on Grodin's own life a bit more than the first one. The film backdrop came naturally to the daughter of the co-founder of AMC Theaters, Stanley Durwood. She grew up immersed in movies and the theatrical exhibition of films.

Adding to her cinema expertise is the fact that the author is the wife of stage and film actor Charles Grodin.

The second novel has a clever Agatha Christie-style plot with a host of well-drawn suspects in the campus murder -- the suspense builds steadily to the final pages.

"I worked very hard on the suspects and trying to get the story going much faster this time," the writer said. "I think I had a much better feeling this time because I was more relaxed about the task at hand.

"Being less uptight makes the work go much easier," Grodin added.

The writer said it was fun to make the campus film festival and the work of Alfred Hitchcock central to the mystery.

"It allowed me to give a shout out to my dad. I really grew up in movie theaters. The business was small when I was a kid -- a handful of theaters," she said of her father's chain prior to its growth into one of the biggest movie theater operations in the United States.

Grodin also liked weaving classic American and European films into the narrative and making an off-campus arthouse a major setting.

Like most baby boomers, Grodin has vivid memories of seeing the films of Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman and other European masters in great arthouses where the lobbies would become the scene of heated discussions after screenings of "Jules and Jim" or "Persona." Hitchcock's elevation in status from Hollywood hitmaker to great film artist was in part spurred by a hugely popular book of interviews Hitchcock did with Truffaut that was published in 1966.

"I'm 60 and when I was in college in the 1970s, it was all about arthouses," Grodin said. "My first artistic hero was Truffaut."

Grodin fears today's young film audience isn't as connected with the classics and foreign filmmaking as earlier generations were. She is concerned about reports of resistance to subtitled films by contemporary college students.

"My protagionist is 27, and part of what I wanted to do in the book was to teach people that age a teeny bit about classic cinema. I chose Hitchcock because I adore his films, and he is the most accessible (of the great moviemakers)," she said.

Grodin wants to continue the Edwina Goodman series, but she is taking a brief break to figure out where the next book might take her character.

"It will be a bit of a hard act to follow, but I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next," she said.